Coming Out

It’s rarely good to keep a secret from those you love. “Rarely good” turns into “a horrible idea” when your secret is about who you are. It’s hiding a huge part of yourself from the people who are supposed to always be there for you. Who are supposed to always love you.

At first, it seems like keeping your secret isn’t doing any harm. I mean, it’s not all of who you are. You’re more than it. So what if you like girls? You’re not dating anyone, anyway. It’s just something you have to keep hidden from your family, who are strict Christians, and friends, who would judge you.

Eventually, though, keeping your secret takes its toll. You feel like you can’t be completely open with others because if you’re hiding this from them, you might as well hide everything else you think they won’t like or approve of. You get a hollow feeling inside, one that can only be filled by telling somebody, anybody.

Hiding the fact that you’re gay really is hiding a part of yourself. It’s like nobody knowing that you listen to a certain type of music or have a certain religion or really love a certain food. If they don’t know the most important things about you, including your sexuality, they really don’t know you at all. And then you’re left with a choice: Do you continue to hide your secret from everybody you know and love or just come out with it and hope for the best?

I chose somewhere in between. Tell only a select few and keep it hidden from everybody else for the time being. Start with those I knew were most open, and then build myself up to telling the more conservative, religious people in my life.

First, I told my very best friend, Jean. She had some cousin who came out as gay a few years ago. She would understand. The second the words left my lips, I felt better. Even if she took the news negatively, I was freer. Somebody else knew. I no longer had to hide. For a few seconds, she stared at me. Incredulous. My heart stopped. This was it. After ten and a half years of friendship, we were no longer friends. I mean, who wants to hear their best girl friend likes girls when you don’t? Would she think that I had a crush on her? What would she think of all the sleepovers we’d always had? Would she read into them, as though I had ulterior motives to our friendship? No, wait. I opened my mouth to take it back.

“I knew it!” Jean proclaimed, cutting me off before I even started. “I knew it!” She hugged me tightly. “I knew it!” she repeated again.

“How?”

“I just did! Gaydar, I guess! Oh, yay! I’m so happy you told me.” She was smiling widely. “Keeping that had to have been killing you.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “Don’t tell anyone. You’re the first person I told.”

“Girl, I’m hurt. Do you think I would ever tell anybody that? It’s not mine to tell. But your parents are not going to be happy.”

My parents. Strict, ultraconservative Christians. They’d have a heart attack if they found out I wasn’t planning on getting married to a man.

Other friends took the news more like I expected my parents would. Namely, Nicholas. He was born in a small town in Tennessee where being gay would get you shot. When I told him, he looked at me like Jean had. Silence. A long minute passed. “You’re disgusting.” Shocked. Deadened. “A lesbian? You might as well just have sex with a dog,” he spat. “What’s the difference, anyway? Disgusting. Unnatural. Get out of my house.” Numb. Broken. I left. All of my emotions hit me at once.

Why did I possibly think that telling people could be a good thing? I sobbed. I felt happy for the first time in a long time, but was that worth losing some of my best friends and possibly my family? My family. I can’t tell them.

No, I need to tell my family. If there’s anybody who really needs to know who I am, it’s my family. Friends can come and go. I can eventually find another friend to replace the support and friendship I found in Nicholas. No matter what, my family will always be my family. Even if my coming out doesn’t make them happy, they will still love me. My parents believed in a more vengeful God than I did, but they always told us to follow Jesus’s teachings and love those less fortunate than us and to look past a person’s sins to see the true good within.

I had to tell them right then and there. If I didn’t tell them soon, I would explode. Or lose my nerve and never be able to tell them. I drove home and found my parents sitting together on the couch reading some books I’ve since forgotten.

“I’m gay.” Instant relief. There. Done.

No matter how they reacted, they knew. Everybody important to me knew and I was complete at last. Except my parents were now looking at me like I had played a pivotal role in the execution of Jesus, which I suppose I had, in their eyes. But they weren’t saying anything. They both stared at me, completely silent, and I began to pray that they would just say something, anything. Suddenly, fear.

“Have you had sex with anyone yet?” my father asked. I wasn’t expecting that response and it caught me off guard.

“No.”

“Then we can pray your gay away and we’ll be fine. We won’t go to Hell,” my mother said.

“Mama, it doesn’t work like that. Just because I haven’t had sex with a girl doesn’t mean I don’t like girls. Praying won’t change that.”

I don’t remember what was said next, but I remember my mother’s actions. Her hand flung out and slapped me across the face. Stinging pain. Frozen. She grabbed me by the collar. Dragged me to the prayer room.

More of a closet, the prayer room was a small room with a large framed picture of Jesus on the wall. She pushed me in and shut the door without saying a word. I had never been in the prayer room before, but I knew what was expected of me based on my twin sister’s various trips to the room because of her numerous encounters with boys. I was to stay in the room and pray until God had forgiven my sins.

“I know you would forgive me,” I said to the picture of Jesus, his hand raised in blessing.
Through the past 18 years of my life, I had been the perfect daughter. I was respectful and submissive. I always finished all of my chores and even helped around the house without being asked on a regular basis. I went to church every week, would pray every morning and night. I had good grades and volunteered twice a week with the homeless. Jesus wouldn’t reduce my life to one being deserving of my soul spending the eternity in Hell just because I’m attracted to girls, not boys. My parents shouldn’t, either. I prayed for the forgiveness of the Lord and crossed myself before standing and opening the door.

“I’m still gay,” I said. “Jesus would have forgiven-“

“Jesus might have, but God won’t,” my mother snapped. “Now you have damned us to an eternity in Hell!” I opened my mouth to protest. They had done nothing wrong and they wouldn’t go to Hell. My mother interjected. “You have half an hour to get out of our house.”

This was worse than ever expected. Abandoned. Disowned. I packed, left the house. My emotions crashed down. Crushed me into a heap on the side of the road. Discarded. Rejected. Homeless.
Jean. Of course. One block down. I pulled myself together and hurried to her house. She waited patiently for me to get the whole story out and then helped me unpack everything into her house’s guest room.

“My parents will love and support you like yours are supposed to,” she said. “Your parents will come around eventually, and if they don’t, then you’ll move past it sooner or later.”

“You don’t understand.”

“No, I don’t,” she admitted. “But I know that you are like my sister and my parents love you like another daughter, regardless of who you are attracted to.”

She hugged me tightly and when she finally let me go, I realized that I had to move forward, even if I potentially had lost my family forever. I had others who loved me and I would be okay again eventually. The hard part was over. Now, all I had to do was move forward with my life.